Heritage in Transition: Challenges in Post-Ottoman Digital Humanities

Abstract

This article presents a series of digital humanities pilot projects that were designed and developed by an interdisciplinary research team as part of the project: “Histories, Spaces and Heritages at the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek State.” These pilot projects offer new, innovative online resources for multimodal research, pedagogy and engagement with historical sources and archives that document historic Greek urban environments at their transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek state. They include an interactive timeline, a dynamic bibliographic management tool combined with a web-mapping application of Ottoman sites and monuments in Greece, and “Senseflows”, a digital archive focusing on the sensorial aspects of Thessaloniki’s transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek state (1912–1923). We discuss these projects, focusing on “Senseflows” in more detail, in the context of the “Histories, Spaces and Heritages” collaborative research network and initiative supported by the French School at Athens but also in the broader context of addressing research gaps, methodological problems and pathways for collaboration in digital humanities approaches to the Greek Ottoman, post-Ottoman and contemporary past.